Thursday, May 26, 2011

17 Undiscovered Pyramids Seen from Space

The following article from The Star reports on the work of the American archeologist Sarah Parcak whose technology has helped Mary McDonald to make important discoveries in Egypt and Sudan.

A satellite perched hundreds of kilometres above the Earth has produced a fusion of modern technology and ancient wonder that some experts are hailing as one of the great archeological finds in a century.

“Seventeen lost pyramids!” exclaimed Kathlyn Cooney, an assistant professor of Egyptology at the University of California at Los Angeles. “That would be one of the most important discoveries in the last 100 years. That’s amazing.”

Cooney was referring to a series of infra-red images and high-resolution photographs taken from a satellite suspended 700 kilometres above Egypt, in a project directed by University of Alabama archeologist Sarah Parcak.

What those images have revealed nearly boggles the mind — 17 previously undiscovered pyramids, more than 1,000 antique tombs and at least 3,000 ancient settlements.

All of them are invisible to the human eye, all buried beneath the countless layers of sediment that have been deposited over the millennia by the annual flooding of the Nile River.

Canadian archeologist Mary McDonald's work has provided conclusive evidence of Saharan/Kushite antecedents to Nilotic culture. McDonald has shown that the ancient Pharaonic civilization built upon the culture of Saharan peoples. Comparing ostrich eggshell excavated from the Bashendi circles with those found in Egypt, she found that nearly all of the shared artifacts showed up in Dakhleh, in the southwestern desert of Egypt, 500 to 2000 years before they appeared in the Nile Valley. Additionally, cattle domestication took place in the Sahara long before it appeared in the Nile Valley. No solid evidence has been found for cattle domestication in the Nile Valley before 6000 years ago.

Fekri Hassan, Petrie Professor of Archaeology at University College London, believes that “Mary’s work has been an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the origins of Egyptian civilization.” Hassan says, “Her work confirmed that one of the main strands in the early civilization of the Nile Valley was the contribution from the inhabitants of the Sahara."